Guilty Wives (22 page)

LUCY PUSHED ME
into the room. I lunged forward but then stopped and turned so that my back was to neither Lucy nor Sabine. I backpedaled to the wall.

In French, Lucy said, “Take off your clothes.”

We were required to submit to a strip search upon any guard’s request at any time. I had no legal right to say no. “No,” I said.

There was one window, covered with iron bars, that looked out over the courtyard where we first got off the bus, where Sabine first beat the piss out of me. Lucy closed the inside shutter, leaving the three of us in total privacy.

Lucy and Sabine looked at each other, and they seemed to make a decision that Sabine would be first. I wasn’t sure what that meant but I had an idea.

Lucy poured herself and Sabine a cup of vodka. She even offered me one but I was too tense to respond. My hands balled into fists.

The two guards saluted each other and downed their shots. Sabine sat on the cot and loosened the belt on her pants.

In French, Lucy said, “You will pleasure us. First, Sabine.”

I didn’t respond, didn’t move, which itself was an answer.

Sabine pulled down her pants and lay flat on the cot, resting her disgusting little head on the pillow. Lucy advanced on me with predatory eyes and her baton drawn. “You will do this,” she said.

I shook my head no. Lucy got close to me and swatted the baton in my direction. She wasn’t trying for serious contact, but she caught my hand, raised in defense, rapping my knuckles hard. I shuffled away from her, as if we were doing a dance around the room. She was herding me toward the cot, where Sabine had now pulled her underwear down to her ankles and awaited me.

“You will do this,” said Lucy in French, “or you will never walk the same again.”

She swatted the baton at me once more, this time landing with a crack on my wrist. I was like a trapped mouse, my back against the wall, ready to move in either direction, while Lucy shadowed me.

“No!” I blurted out with rising panic.

“Lucy,” Sabine called out. In my peripheral vision, I saw Sabine hike up her underwear and pants.
“Nous devons commencer avec elle.”

We will have to start with her. A shudder coursed through me.

Sabine got off the cot, took her baton, and joined Lucy. Lucy handed her baton to Sabine, so her hands were free.

In an instant, Lucy was on me, grabbing my hair with one hand and tearing at my shirt with the other. She wrestled me to the floor and I tried to scream but sheer terror prevented me from uttering a sound. I moved my legs furiously and tried to push her off me but she was far stronger than I was, and her fury seemed to outweigh my fear.

Her forearm to my face held me down and she yanked off my pants. I tried desperately to find my voice, as if it would do any good to scream in here, as if anyone would listen, and I realized that as brutal as the physical torture had been, it didn’t hold a candle to this, to this violation, this utter invasion—

“Hold still!” Lucy grunted into my face. I was now naked from the waist down, as Sabine approached me with her baton in one hand.

Tears blinded my eyes, my pulse exploded through my body, bells and whistles screaming in my brain—
DON’T, PLEASE DON’T
—

And then the alarm bells went off. Real ones, booming sirens throughout the prison. All of us froze. We looked at each other for a beat before panic spread across Lucy’s face.

Real alarms. Sirens with a distinctive cadence—three quick beeps, buzz. Three quick beeps, buzz. I’d never heard them before, but they’d been explained to me. They could mean only one thing.

Someone was trying to escape.

I QUICKLY DRESSED
and Lucy handcuffed me to the cot. She and Sabine rushed out, bolting the door behind them. I dragged the cot toward the window and used my free hand to open the shutter.

If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have believed it. The rooftop lights were all turned on. A searchlight coming from the prison yard provided further illumination, sweeping across the midnight sky as it tried to stay locked on the helicopter hovering over the rooftop.

The copter was blue with white trim. A rope dangled down from the copter and a woman was climbing it, struggling as the rope swayed from side to side and the copter bobbed like a buoy in the ocean. From the copter, gunfire erupted from some kind of rifle toward the courtyard. The guards in the towers on each side of the front gate, to my right, had opened fire on the copter. The woman was struggling to climb the ladder. She was heavyset and her ponytail—wait—

“Mona,” I said. My cell mate Mona was escaping. Right—she’d been working late tonight in the library, which was in the back of the prison.

The gunfire abated from the guard tower nearest me. Had someone been shot? I didn’t know. Guards in the tower on the other flank were still firing on the helicopter, sparks flying off the copter’s body as it bobbed and spun, making it difficult for Mona to climb.

She was halfway up the rope when the helicopter rose. A decision by the pilot. Escaping with Mona dangling from the rope was preferable to being shot out of the sky.

Right decision, but too late. A burst of flame came from the rear of the copter and it began to spin out of control. The copter rose a bit higher and then veered sharply to its left, toward the courtyard, moving almost sideways through the air and losing altitude.

I averted my eyes but not in time. I saw Mona lose her grip on the ladder and fly through the air before plummeting to the courtyard face-first. My eyes moved away just as I saw her head burst open on impact. A moment later, the helicopter crashed down on its nose, not twenty yards from Mona’s body, bursting into flames.

I felt the heat on my face, the sting in my eyes. This was happening right in front of me, maybe thirty yards away. The tactical-response guards didn’t stop shooting into the helicopter until the fire department showed up, maybe twenty minutes later, spraying the orange flames and dark clouds of smoke until nothing was left but a melted, twisted bird.

I closed the shutter as the smoke drifted toward me, closing my nose to the putrid scent of burned gasoline. It reminded me of the Molotov cocktails, of the attack on the police convoy during the trial. But I had lived to see another day.

Mona Mourcelles would not.

THE SIX OF US STOOD,
handcuffed, outside cell 413 while the guards tossed the room.
Une recherche,
they called it—a search. The prison retained the right to inspect our cells at any time for contraband. They went through the mattresses and our books and opened our personal boxes—each of us had a rectangular box where we could hold any personal items, from candy to cigarettes to CDs, whatever we bought from the commissary that would fit in there.

The guards removed a bunch of stuff from the cell. Then they marched us down to the basement and interrogated us. They stripped us naked, hosed us down, and threw out a few questions to us while they beat us with their batons. It wasn’t much of an interrogation. It was more an outlet for their anger.

Mona and the two Saudis in the helicopter—friends of her boyfriend—had perished in the failed escape. But more important than all that, a prison guard in the tower had died in a spray of gunfire. The guards had lost one of their own, and someone had to pay. Might as well be Mona’s cell mates, even though, as far as I knew, none of us had been aware of Mona’s plans.

The six of us lay huddled on the floor, shivering from the cold spray that hit us every few minutes, covering our heads while the guards rained down blows with their batons. Lexie, lying next to me, was positively terrified. This was the first time I’d seen her outside the cell. She’d gone about twenty months, at this point, without leaving it.

“Qui a su du plan?”
they kept asking. Who knew of her plan? The longer we failed to answer, the angrier the guards became. They had lost control of their rage. They were swinging the batons wildly, striking our feet and ankles, our midsections, even our heads. I’d been on the receiving end of a lot of abuse, but I’d never seen anything this violent, this uncontrolled.

“Elle ne nous a pas dit!”
Linette protested, sitting up. She didn’t tell us, she was saying. Yelling back at the guards didn’t seem like a bright idea here, even if Linette was speaking the truth.

One of the guards whom I didn’t know moved toward Linette after her outburst. But Lucy intervened, putting a hand on the guard. Lucy wanted to handle this one herself. She smiled broadly at me, then grabbed Linette by the hair and dragged her out of the room.

“Linette!” I started to crawl toward her, passing Lexie, when I heard something from one of the guards and then it hit me, square on the mouth, a blow from the baton.

My head snapped back. My eyes rolled back in my head. And then everything went black.

I WOKE UP
vomiting on a stained concrete floor. My jaw ached so badly I thought it might be broken. My face felt puffy. I was so dizzy that I couldn’t maintain my balance.

I surveyed my surroundings. The room was about six, maybe seven square meters. A high ceiling from which a lone lightbulb hung. Walls covered with mildew and laden with graffiti. Stains all along the floor.

This was segregation. Solitary confinement, as it’s known in the States. Le Mitard, they called it here.

I crawled over to the faucet, which jutted out from the wall like an outdoor spigot, and turned it on. The pressure was weak, the water lukewarm. I held a hand under it and splashed it on my face. Drank a little. It was potable, but bitter with the taste of iron. I spat blood into the drain on the floor.

The intercom, up high on the wall, crackled.
“Mettez votre dos à la porte et les mains par l’ouverture,”
the voice said.

I forced myself to my feet. My knees were dirty and bloody and stiff. The front of my shirt was covered in blood and vomit. I was woozy but I managed to comply with the guard’s directive. I stood against the door and placed my hands behind me, through the opening. A pair of handcuffs slid over my wrists.

“Reculez-vous de la porte.”

I complied again, standing back from the door, my hands cuffed behind me. A guard entered and grabbed me from behind by my handcuffs, directing me out of the cell.

“What happened to Linette?” I asked.
“Qu’est-il arrivé à Linette?”

The guard didn’t answer. She just marched me back to my cell. My head was ringing and my nausea was replaced with a sense of dread.

The guard opened my cell door. Inside, the place was a disaster from the guards tossing it, searching for contraband. Four of my cell mates sat silently, as if in shock.

Josette, the leader. Penelope, the Spaniard. Camille, the drug addict. Lexie, the deranged arsonist.

Mona, of course, was dead from the aborted escape.

That left Linette as the only one unaccounted for.

“Où est Linette?”
I asked.

Josette was the only one who would make eye contact with me. Her expression was as hard as ever, but her eyes were brimming with tears.

She shook her head slowly.

It took a moment before it registered, before I absorbed it. “No!” I cried. I collapsed to the floor. “No!” I pounded on the concrete and just screamed, guttural cries, my throat filled with anguish and venom. Another wave of nausea surged through me and I retched several times, dry-heaving bile, the contents of my stomach having long been expelled.

“Not Linette,” I pleaded in vain. Not when she was only months away from release, when she was going to marry the love of her life, Giorgio.

After a while I was merely panting like a rabid animal.

“Ils l’ont tuée,”
I said. They killed her.

Josette looked up at the ceiling.
“C’était un accident,”
she said.
“Elle est tombée et a frappé sa tête.”

“What?” I raised my head. “She didn’t slip and hit her head. This wasn’t some
accident.
Lucy killed her! Lucy killed her!” I repeated.

“Non.”
Josette’s voice trembled.
“Un accident.”

I stared at Josette, then at the others. They were all nodding along with Josette. I realized I’d been mistaken. My cell mates weren’t in shock. They were terrified. Scared to death. Even Josette, the hardest of the bunch, was singing the company line: Linette had fallen and struck her head. Nobody was willing to say that Lucy had beaten our friend to death.

Because if they did, the next “accident” would be theirs.

“We can’t let them get away with this!” I said, getting to my feet. I repeated myself, this time in French, but I could see it didn’t matter which language I spoke.

“Nous n’avons pas un choix,”
Penelope said.

“Of course we have a choice,” I pleaded. “Of
course
we do.”

But I was arguing in vain. There was nothing I could say that would talk them out of their fear.

Linette, my dear friend—
our
dear friend,
everyone’s
friend in JRF—was dead, murdered by Lucy, and we were going to turn our backs and pretend the whole thing was a slip-and-fall.

“Murderers!” I banged on the buzzer for the intercom, screaming into it. Josette and Penelope rushed from their beds and grabbed me, restrained me. I fought them off initially and kept whacking at the intercom, which never answered me. Finally they tackled me to the ground, where I lay sobbing and hyperventilating until the lights went out at eight o’clock.

“YOU SHOULD SAY
something,” said my husband, Jeffrey.

Six days had passed since Linette’s death. Six days of staring at the walls of my cell, at the bed once occupied by Linette, hardly eating, hardly speaking other than when I went to the infirmary for my job. The prison had conducted its typical “investigation” into Linette’s death and come back with the unsurprising “finding” that Linette Giselle Moreau had died when she slipped in her cell and struck her head on the floor. Four of her five cell mates, in their interviews, corroborated this version of events. I was the lone holdout. The official paperwork described me as
peu coopératif
—uncooperative—and “unwilling to give a suitable account of the event.”

The guards had been shrewd in their write-up. They estimated the time of death as falling between 7:30 and 8:30 in the morning, which placed the occurrence right near the 8:00 a.m. shift change. This, I had come to learn, was how it worked when fatal “accidents” occurred at JRF. If there were ever an official inquiry by the Ministry of Justice and Liberty, not only would it be difficult to isolate a particular guard as the culprit, but it would be impossible to even identify which
shift
of guards was on duty at the time—the crew that was ending at 8:00 a.m. or the one that was just starting.

“Anything,” said Jeffrey. “Tell me what you think.”

Across from me, dressed comfortably in a button-down shirt and blue jeans, sat my husband. This was Jeffrey’s first time visiting me. It only took him three and a half months. Sometimes he’d tried excuses—the move back to the States, getting settled back into civilian life at Georgetown, spending weekends with the kids, who were still having a really tough time with all this. Take your pick: Jeff could invent a reason not to visit.

Sometimes he didn’t even bother with an excuse.

I couldn’t totally fault him. We hadn’t parted on good terms, after all, and it wasn’t like our marriage was in fabulous shape before my arrest.

“Abbie, c’mon,” Jeffrey repeated. “Talk to me.”

I gave him a cold smile. “You pass on a dozen chances to visit. You wait almost four months before you show your face. Then, within ten minutes of gracing me with an appearance, you tell me you want out of our marriage. And now the burden’s on
me
to say something.”

“Abbie—”

“How about, ‘Fuck you’? Does that work, Jeff?”

A large part of me wasn’t surprised. I guess I should have been grateful he didn’t just drop the divorce papers in the mail.

“Listen, Abbie,” he said, knifing a hand on the table. “We both made some mistakes—”

I laughed out loud. “You have a speech prepared? Are you kidding me?” I leaned into him. “Yes, we both made mistakes. Letting you talk me into dropping my career and moving to Switzerland, for starters, so you could fuck the ambassador while I stayed home waiting like a helpless little housewife—”

“And I believe the entire
world
knows of
your
indiscretion,” he hissed back. He read the expression on my face. “Oh, what—your little romp in the hay was different? It doesn’t count if it’s with a movie star?”

Incredibly, this was the first time we’d ever discussed the topic. Both of our “indiscretions,” as Jeff put it, became part of my trial, part of the overall story, part of the tabloid hysterics the world over. But we avoided talking about it one-on-one.

“You’d already broken us,” I replied. “You, with your damn affair. What I did was wrong, and I take responsibility for it. But it wasn’t some planned, long-term relationship, sneaking around behind your back and inventing all sorts of excuses. It was an impulse, after I’d drunk more alcohol than—”

“Oh, just spare me that ‘spur-of-the-moment’ crap, all right?” Jeffrey waved a hand. His face was crimson and his eyes rabid. “Like you didn’t go to Monte Carlo looking for it. Like you weren’t looking for it earlier that day at that pool. You were carrying on like a little tramp! Giggling and flirting at the pool in your skimpy little bikini—”

One of the guards slapped a hand down on our table.
“Si vous ne restez pas tranquille, votre mari devra partir,”
he said, threatening to end the visit if we didn’t quiet down.

“Excusez,”
Jeffrey said in apology. He took a breath and settled down.

My blood had gone cold. I just stared at Jeffrey, my body still as a statue but my mind racing. I was pretty sure that the color had drained from my face.

Jeffrey let out a long sigh. “I’m sorry for what I did. I’ve paid a pretty damn high price for it—but I’m sorry all the same. But now it’s a—”

I felt myself get up from the table. Suddenly, I couldn’t be in the same room with this man. “You can have the divorce,” I said, or words to that effect. I don’t know what I said. I just wanted to get away from him. I needed to think.

Like you weren’t looking for it earlier that day at that pool.

Carrying on like a little tramp. Giggling and flirting at the pool in your skimpy little bikini.

“I really am sorry,” Jeffrey said. “But really, Abbie—you can’t be surprised.”

Surprised? It depended on what he meant.

I wasn’t surprised that he was asking for a divorce. I knew that day would come.

But I was very surprised indeed to learn that Jeffrey had been in Monte Carlo on the day that President Henri Devereux was murdered.